The Best Black Friday Ever

Samsung’s Best Black Friday Ever campaign was multi-faceted. Samsung wanted a responsive, retail web site that would only be live through the month of November. The site would reveal exclusive, week-by-week deals culminating with Black Friday. This was paired with a social media campaign that used agressive social response to primarily provoke discussion around Samsung products during Black Friday and secondarily to drive to the site.

The Website

Each week, the Best Black Friday Ever site would unlock new deals. Visitors would self-identify as online shoppers (which we termed internally as Black Friday ‘haters’) or in-store shoppers (‘lovers’). If they hated going to the store on Black Friday, we directed them to create a wishlist of online deals, which they could then purchase from home on Black Friday. If they loved shopping in-store on Black Friday, and thus were likely mentally disturbed, we urged them to create a shopping plan for where to buy the products they wanted. We provided them with a map of retailers in their area that carried the products they desired.

I was brought onto this at R/GA as an ACD to oversee the final design and take it through launch. The site was hugely successful. So successful that Samsung guaranteed the business to R/GA for the next year.

My Role

Creative direction, art direction

Client

Samsung

Agency

R/GA

YEAR

2013

Social Media

There were two ideas for social media. Neither of which I came up with. Both relied solely on Twitter, and neither were mutually exclusive. First, was Tweetducken – a reference to the infamous Turducken on Thanksgiving. We described this concept to the client as “a tweet within a tweet”. That sounded so awesome, that the client was on board immediately. When it came time to actually execute, no one knew exactly how a tweet within a tweet within a tweet would work or be communicated effectively. Nevertheless, we soldiered on. The rules: you follow Samsung on twitter, then you retweet a Samsung tweet with your own witty addition, and then if Samsung (err, the RGAers hanging out in the studio on Black Friday) retweeted your retweet, the post would be deemed a Tweetducken and Samsung would award the tweeter with a prize. We made “ingredients cards” to explain the process and I made a fun Tweetducken graphic.

The other social idea was The Samsung Singers. We hired an improv comedy troupe that could sing. We had them on set for all of Black Friday. We combed twitter for witty, Samsung-related tweets, mostly from people bragging about the Samsung products the managed to snag during the insanity of Black Friday. The Samsung Singers would take the boastful tweet and re-imagine the tweet through song on the spot, and we filmed it live, and chucked it back into the twitter-verse in minutes.